Two seemingly contradictory statements can coexist without canceling each other out, so while it’s fair to say that Tom Brady’s upcoming debut in the Fox broadcast booth is a big deal, the GOAT’s first shift behind the mic isn’t going to have much of an impact on the ratings for the Cowboys-Browns opener.
While many fans are curious to see how Fox’s $375 million acquisition handles himself in front of a live audience—it’s probably safe to venture that the guy who appeared in 10 Super Bowls isn’t going to break out in flop sweat—a Dallas road opener that’s set to air in 93% of all U.S. markets is going to do numbers regardless of who’s calling the action.
Now that the NFL’s three-year experiment with splitting the Week 1 national broadcast window between CBS and Fox has come to an end, Brady’s maiden voyage will have the spotlight all to itself. But for Fox’s regionalized coverage of Commanders-Bucs, the only other games that might steal a little share in the late-afternoon window are a pair of local West Coast matchups on CBS (Raiders-Chargers, Denver-Seattle). History says Fox will make out like a bandit; in 2019, the last time the network hosted the Cowboys in a standalone, coast-to-coast season opener, Jerry Jones’ charges humbled the Giants in front of an audience of 23.9 million fans.
It’s no secret that Dallas is the most consistent driver of NFL TV ratings; per Nielsen, the Cowboys beat all comers last season with an average draw of 24.9 million viewers per game across a staggering 14 national appearances. (Big D’s TV turnout beat the runners-up in Philly by a margin of 1.25 million viewers per game.) Dallas tends to overperform when it kicks off a new season on Fox, averaging a hair over 26 million viewers in the last decade over the course of five national outings.
As one might expect, those nosebleed deliveries go a long way toward justifying the expense of buying in-game spots in Fox’s national NFL broadcasts. The average unit cost for 30 seconds of airtime in the network’s premium window is north of $800,000, which make this the priciest regularly scheduled slot on the broadcast dial. And if that sounds like a lot of scratch for a half-minute of blahblahblah, the cost of reaching each batch of 1,000 viewers via an in-game NFL buy is in step with pretty much everything else on TV.
All told, the average CPM for an NFL game last season was $74, on par with the cost of entry for a primetime sitcom or cop/lawyer/doctor show ($77). The only substantive difference is the number of eyeballs that will land on your ad in each environment: If you’re looking at vanilla impressions, pro football is going to serve up around 17.8 million viewers per game, whereas the average episode of entertainment programming drew 3.38 million per episode last season.
As far as Brady’s big booth moment is concerned, Fox wisely has avoided making a whole lot of fuss about the new guy’s opening reps. Some of that reticence can be chalked up to not wanting to inadvertently apply any additional pressure (although, again, this is Touchdown Tahwmmy were talking about here; other than Giants fans, does anyone really think he’ll allow himself to fail at anything?), but keeping the hype fires banked is largely an acknowledgment that people tune in for matchups, not broadcast crews.
While sports-media types will be hanging on Brady’s every word come Sunday afternoon, establishing causality is next to impossible when it comes to gauging the impact the broadcast booth has on the Nielsen ratings. As sports ad sales execs never tire of reminding us, there’s no evidence that any booth combination since the halcyon days of Pat Summerall-John Madden has had a material impact on the size of the NFL TV audience. Sure, Brady might go viral if he offers a radioactive take about national politics or cracks a joke about Jerry Jones’ recent paternity suit, but memes aren’t ratings currency, and the internet isn’t real. (Also, and this should probably go without saying, but the odds of TB12 going full Joker are right up there with his Pats holding the Lombardi Trophy aloft on Feb. 9.)
Fox didn’t lose a step when Joe Buck and Troy Aikman took their considerable talents to ESPN ahead of the 2022 season, and by the end of the first year of Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olsen’s short-lived partnership, the network’s NFL ratings were at a six-year high. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that Fox enjoyed the benefit of hosting five Cowboys games that same season, or maybe it was the four Packers outings that helped supercharge the schedule. Could go either way, really; their head-to-head showdown averaged just shy of 30 million viewers in the national window.
Whatever served as the impetus for Fox’s strong showing, Burkhardt and Olsen’s fine work arguably had very little impact on how many fans tuned in over the course of that 2022 season. Even a wildly popular booth won’t sweeten the ratings calculus; while fans and media yakkers were busy falling all over themselves about Tony Romo’s first season with CBS, the network’s national NFL deliveries fell 8% compared to the final season of the Jim Nantz-Phil Simms battery.
A top-notch booth is an invaluable asset, to be sure, but the allure of the NFL has very little to do with America’s desire to listen to a couple guys in quarter-zip sweaters and blazers talk about football for three hours. Brady will be just fine in his new digs, but even a man with seven titles under his belt isn’t going to move the needle on the Nielsen dial.
